TELEGRAMME PRINTS, 1103 Queen East, 416-463-8998, www.telegramme.ca Rating: NNNNN
Back to Leslieville we go. This time we’re hitting the Queen and Pape strip to check out Telegramme Prints, Ian Gillies and Laura Watson‘s new poster gallery. Behind a vintage leaded-glass window, are walls of remastered, hand-pulled lithographs and silkscreened concert bills, tracing poster art from its stylized, turn-of-the-20th-century golden age to modern, collage-inspired designs.
Limited-edition works including absinthe ads, circus promos and opera announcements by old poster masters like Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Ludwig Hohlwein are reproduced by New York City’s S2 Atelier. A poster can take four to six weeks to print, using as many as 16 different plates of vibrant coloured ink.
Contemporary artists like Seattle-based Patent Pending Industries and Minnesota’s Aesthetic Apparatus have created their own design traditions. Graphic posters for acts like Belle and Sebastian, Babyshambles and Stereolab feature a hand-stamp look, free-form fonts and a retro fluorescent print palette.
Telegramme picks: Three downhill skiers carve up a slope in Sascha Maurer‘s Ski At Lake Placid poster, $540 framed a silkscreened Babyshambles print promotes an October 29, 2006, concert at Manchester Academy that never happened, $26 L’Absinthe Rend Fou from 1910 warns drinkers about the drives-you-crazy green fairy, $395 framed.
Look for: Letterpress prints coming soon.
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday noon to 6 pm, Sunday noon to 5 pm.
